At a time when the Congress is speaking with a forked tongue on the Government’s move to abrogate the special status to Jammu & Kashmir under Article 370, there came a new one on Thursday as senior leader and former Union Minister Jairam Ramesh sought his party to introspect and see reason why Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s governance model was not a “complete negative story”.
Not recognising his work and demonising him all the time is not going to help, said Ramesh adding it is time we recognise Modi’s work and what he did between 2014 and 2019 due to which he was voted back to power by over “30 per cent of the electorate”.
Crisis-hit Congress, which remained headless for two and a half months following its president Rahul Gandhi’s resignation owning up for the party’s Lok Sabha debacle, has been speaking in different voices on the issue of Article 370 with its young turks backing the Modi Government’s move. In the Lok Sabha elections, the Congress had run a very personalized campaign against Modi and sought to demolish his model of administration and governance.
“We talked about farmers’ distress throughout our entire campaign, people realise there was farmers’ distress but they did not hold Modi responsible for it. You saw what happened in the elections result
thereafter. We have to understand what made him respectable,” he said.
The BJP got 37.4 per cent of votes in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections and the NDA, as a whole, secured nearly 45 per cent of votes.
“Let me tell you it is not a completely negative story when it comes to economics of the governance, the politics of the governance is completely different,” he said, adding “the social relations that have been created out of his governance model is also completely different”.
To prove his point, Ramesh gave the example of the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUJ) and how successful it turned out for Modi. “In 2019, all of us in the political discourse made fun of one or two of his programmes, but it has turned out in all electoral studies that the PMUJ is one single program which has been able to connect him with crores and crores of women and given him the political traction which he didn’t have in 2014,” he pointed out.
“Now if we are going to run this down and say this is all hocus pocus and say these are wrong numbers, we are not going to confront this guy,” he cautioned.
Ramesh made the remarks while launching a book, “Malevolent Republic: A Short History of the New India” written by Kapil Satish Komireddi, a political analyst.
“He (Modi) talks in a language that connects him with the people. Unless we recognize that he is doing things which people recognise and which have not been done in the past, we are not going to be able to confront this guy,” said the Congress leader.
“Also, if you are going to demonize him all the time, you are not going to be able to confront him,” warned the former Union minister, who held the portfolios of Rural Development, and Drinking Water and Sanitation in the Manmohan Singh government.
Ramesh, however, sought to clarify that he is not asking anyone to praise or applaud the prime minister, but only wants the political class to at least recognise the traits he has brought to the governance -- particularly the “economics of governance”.
Stating that something happened in the last decade, which catapulted Modi from a “non-entity in national politics” in the 2009 general elections to someone who won elections back to back, Ramesh said people of the country -- right or wrong -- are not relating “current distress to his presence”.